I kicked the door open; the dog came out like a black-furred cannonball. It licked at my wet jeans and barked in relief at my return. I stumbled against the stupid thing. “Go on,” I said, “get on.” The dog, a greyhound mixed with something questionable, shot a look with eyes of wet ebony and dashed past me into the snow.
The parlour fire burned low; powdery grey ash flecked here and there with embers now glowing hot in the draught. The dog's basket lay in the corner, a mess of blankets and chewed rubber toys. I felt the tendons in my elbow pull as I lay the girl on the sheepskin rug before the fire. “OK,” I said, 'just you lay there, love I won't be a minute.' The fire popped and a cinder hit the fireguard. I watched the girl's breathing. Her yellow hair spread over the moth-eaten rug as if that of somebody pulled from the sea. Her breath came in little silver clouds in the parlour's gloom.
I filled an electric kettle in the kitchen, flicked the switch and steadied myself against the worktop. The dog yapped outside, scratched at the door and the clatter of claws brought me out of the fatigue filling me from a broken place inside, a place I ignored most other times.
Two rubber hot water bottles hung from a hook on the back of the bathroom door. I grabbed them, dashed back for the kitchen as the bubbling growl of the kettle grew. The dog howled outside in the snow. I held the tip of the first bottle between the tines of a dining fork over the sink and carefully tipped boiling water inside. The hot rubber smell of the bottle filled the room as I squeezed the air pocket out of it before screwing in the plastic stopper, tight. I did the same with the next, then darted into the parlour and lay them between the girl's arms and her body. You have to warm the core first, with hypothermia. If I set the warmth directly onto the girl's stark blue feet, it most likely would have sent her into shock. Taking her wet clothes off would have been the right thing to do as well, but I had no dry clothes to offer and, it felt wrong; I couldn't do it. She moaned. I shuffled on my knees, lifted away the mesh guard and tipped a little coal from the brass scuttle onto the glowing mess. It hissed and darkened and dust seeped between the cold lumps as flames built from below.
The girl groaned again. Her eyes flickered. I hobbled into the kitchen and, using the morning's filter, set a new pot of coffee to go. Then I went back into the parlour, paused and glanced over at my reflection in a broad, heat-stained mirror above the fire, as though the mirrored double would know what to do in a purer way. One eye was a cicatrice of ruined flesh and the other twinkled back, blue and wide. “So,” I said, “you're going to have to look.” I knelt and, perhaps with too much caution, lifted the green shirt from the girl's wounded side. “Yeah,” I said, resigned. A long and very deep cut gaped open in her pink flesh, the meat red and butcher fresh inside, the wound perhaps ten inches long and an inch deep, as though inflicted by a Stanley knife, something wickedly sharp, but not long enough to damage anything vital. Hypothermia and blood loss, a lethal combination; I lay a hand against the girl's face. The wickedness of the world always surprised me, and I never understood why. She opened her eyes, vivid and green as spring grass.
"You all right, love?" I asked
She muttered something in her language. Then, as though remembering, she started again in English, "They are coming."
"What was that?"
"They are coming."
I looked over at the white sky beyond the window outside. It was snowing again, and the wind was picking up. A storm was on the way.
2/
I bandaged her up well as I could with the old bits and pieces left over in my first-aid kit and waited as life came back to her. Tried ringing the police but my mobile network was down and it's been years since I had a landline. I thought about leaving her and heading over to the village or the closest farm at the foot of the moor, old Gallon's place, but the reality was I was isolated. There was nothing up here on Skelder Moor but silence, and me. Therefore, I decided to wait, see if the storm passed and, if it did, drive her down to Gristhorpe.
She rose about the same time the light fell, slowly, painfully, her shirt crisp with dry blood. She touched her side, winced and stared up at me for what felt a long time. Then she asked for water.
I fetched a splash of tap water in a tin cup and offered it to her. She drank slowly and then cast an eye at the darkness welling against the window. "What is the time?" The accent fell across her words as though light, colouring the blocky Anglo-Saxon phonemes with something almost ethereal.
"That doesn't matter, we have to ring the police."
"Who are you?"
"Langbard," I said, "who did this to you?"
She glanced over at the fire and there seemed a subtle shift in the light of her eyes, as though they were glass, with nothing behind. "It matters only they are coming, they are hunting."
"Why? Who the hell's hunting you?"
"Bad things," she said.
"Then we need to get to the police."
"The police?" She laughed, and then winced as the pain struck again. I wondered if she was still a little delirious. There was no colour to her flesh. "I think not, man."
That made me smile. "Have you taken something? Been out partying somewhere and wandered away?" It seemed the most likely solution; New Age travellers sometimes gathered at stone circles on Skelder Moor to get off their heads on mushrooms or acid or whatever kids did these days to make the world go away, but not with the temperature well below zero and the worst storm of winter on its way. I listened to the wind howl, and wondered if there were more bodies up there, in the dark.
"What happen you eye?"
"My eye?" I lifted a hand and touched the scarred flesh self-consciously. "An accident, when I was a boy."
"Really, what really happened?"
The question was a strange one I attributed to her second-hand knowledge of the language. "I told you," I said, "an accident." I thought back to a day that was burned in me, and, for the first time, couldn't picture it, the bike, the twisted metal, the smash on the high road. It was as though I was looking at something through a haze of smoke, the lines were fading, broken up, and for a terrible moment, it was as though the whole world shifted. I saw that face again, remembered the name behind it, the wedding day three months before and the way she said my name. I killed the thought, pushed it down below things I could hold onto, the stink of burned steel, petrol, a summer's day and the pain, I could take those, but not the name, nor the memory. Not those blue eyes and Judy, Judy gone forever, "It was a motorbike," I said, more to myself.
"They're coming," she said, "we should go."
"Who are 'they'?"
"I told you, bad things."
I nodded. The years have taught me patience, if nothing else. I reached for the packet of Lambert and Butler on the sideboard, lit one and breathed the smoke deeply. The wind howled in the trees outside and the girl glanced at the glass. "You're afraid," I said.
"Yes."
"What's your name?"
"My name is Huldra," she said quickly. She had been sitting on the floor before the fireplace and now, with much effort, she pulled herself up to her feet, "and you must listen to me. We have to get away from the moor."
"Now listen, love," I said, "I've lived me whole life here and there's nowt on that moor but old stones, heather and bloody sheep. If you've fallen out with your boyfriend or whatever, I don't mind putting a roof over your head for the night. I don't know what drugs you took, or how much you drank but...." The dog distracted me. Its hackles rose suddenly and it stood in the corner, cowering. I drew on the cigarette. "Summat's spooked the auld lad."
"They're coming."
"Stop saying that."
"The host, they're coming," she whispered. Then she smiled. "Perhaps I should leave."
"You're in no state to walk anywhere, love, and it's cold out there enough to knock you stone dead, you in your bare feet too. The closest place is Gallon's, eight miles down the road, and we aren't going there."
"Why can we not?"
"It's a long and
old story, one you don't need to know."
"Then you will die too."
I stared at her for a long time. The fire popped and sparked beneath the dog's whimpers. I rushed the cigarette out into an old pub ashtray balanced on the arm of the chair.
Then everything went black.
Power cut; the room plunged into a darkness relieved only by the dwindling fire. I heard the fridge in the far room fall silent. Then there was nothing but the wind, an ocean of air crashing the snow in waves against the stone; trees bending back so far you almost heard them scream. A power cut now was the last thing I wanted.
"Bollocks," I said, standing, slowly.
I heard the girl breathing in the dark and saw, briefly, her eyes flash like a cats. She was saying something in her language, something that sounded like a prayer.
There were candles in the dresser and, as I searched for them, I yelled at her over my shoulder, "Will you stop that bloody chanting, I'm trying to think here."
She fell silent. The dog whimpered. I lit a candle with the bic lighter and, as the flame sparked into life, it revealed Huldra, inches from me. Her overlarge green eyes and almost white hair caught in the sudden glow seemed uncanny, and the hair stood to attention all along the ropy tendons of my neck. "Listen," she whispered
I was confident then that whatever happened to her on the moor, whatever Hells-Angel- brewed acid she dropped had cracked her wits. "Listen to what?"
There was no noise outside the storm, nothing but the barrage of hail against glass, gust against stone and then, as though something far away that was approaching quickly, I heard a sound like the end of the world.
It put me in mind of an old-fashioned horn they used on foxhunts back when, only with a power, a strength that tore at you. It pierced the weather and the night and the world, a growing scream of something in the tempest, something rising with a crash of darkness.
I only realised I'd bit through my lip when I tasted blood. "What the fuck is that."
Huldra glanced at me, then turned and dashed for the door with a speed I thought her injury would deny. The dog snapped at her ankles as she passed. "Wait!" I yelled, but was too late.
She had fled into the night.
3/
I pulled an old sheepskin jacket round my shoulders and looked out through the kitchen door into the yard. The great black mass of the moor appeared and disappeared behind the surging grey wall of snow and the forest on the far side of the white road twisted and roared as if something trapped. I squinted into the cold breeze, and yelled the girl's name. The prints of her bare feet led away through the crisp white snow towards the trees, and beyond that, all was dark. I'd known bad winter storms before, many, too many of them to recall, but there was something different about this. It seemed purposed, as though some malign intelligence lay behind the way it swept down from the snow-wrapped moor. Then there was the girl, off her head, certainly, but barefoot and half naked and out in the teeth of winter on a night you can't see more than five foot in front of you; she seemed so convinced something was following, that 'they' were coming, I admit, it had rattled my cage more than a little. I walked back into the parlour and my hand lingered before the double barrel shotgun bracketed to the wall. I had sworn never to use it except in the direst of circumstances, but the girl's panic had an earnest quality that suggested taking the gun might just be the proper thing to do. Her pursuers could turn out to be meth-fired bikers, crazed cultists, any bloody thing. There was a dust-streaked box of shells on top of the kitchen cupboard and I slipped two into the chambers, pulled on my flat cloth cap and stepped out after her.
The storm howled about my ears. I heard loose tiles chatter like teeth on the roof of the farmhouse and the eerie screech of the forest and nothing else. Usually you could see the distant lights of the village but now there was just darkness, a deep oleaginous gloom slipped behind the whirling snow like a skull behind skin. I shouted her name a couple of times, the dog at my heels, tail jammed between his legs; his coal dark fur had filled with snow, he glanced up at me, the whites around his eyes showing clearly, and I heard that noise again, the horn. It sang down from the moor, out of the air itself, it seemed all around me, the boom of falling ice, the long drawn out note was electrifying, and I held the gun in front of me and looked up and around, but could see nothing.
Then I caught sight of him, standing in the lee of the barn, shivering, a scarf wrapped around his long sallow face, old Gallon, from the next farm down. He was crouched against the wet timbers, his teeth chattering. He saw me and waved and I trudged through the deep snow towards him. "You," I said, "what you doing up here?"
"Power's out," he yelled above the storm.
"You got here fast."
"No, I were driving past, heading home and me 4x4 cut out dead as you like, right outside of here. Same time I saw your lights go down. She won't start, nothing, no lights, no nothing. I was going to walk on, you know I don't want to be here, but I saw summat ... up there." He pointed to the moor behind.
"What did you see?"
"I don't know what it was," he said. Then he looked into my face for a moment, his grey beard filling with snow. "Ever think of her?"
"Pete, don't be a silly beggar."
"A silly beggar, am I? You killed that girl."
"It was an accident."
"She was my sister, my only family."
The horn sounded again and Pete Gallon, a farmer of 40 something years’ experience, clapped his gloved hands either side of his head. I shook his shoulder and said, "I need your help, there's this lass wandering round out here. She doesn't have a clue what she's doing, I don't think she's a full shilling, but she'll die if we don't find her. Help me look for her."
He nodded, staring down at his feet, seemed to collect himself. "Why have you got the gun?"
"Long story."
"I don't like this, none of it. You reckon you're chasing some lass out here, you've a gun, my ride breaking down and that I saw, up there."
"What was it?"
He frowned, seemed to search his memory. "I can't say."
"You can't?"
"I mean there are no words to fit it into."
I pointed to the footprints that were filling with snow. They led into the ancient forest stretching from the moor to the coast. Officially named the Mansfield Estate, we always knew the woods as Fosse Grim.
4/
It was hard going for two gents on the wrong side of 50, as Pete and I both were, made even harder by the fact we hadn't spoken for a couple of decades. His tracking was always superior to mine when we were younger, snaring pheasants and rabbits in Fosse Grim, and he followed the girl's progress through the thickly gathered trees where there was no sign, or indeed trail, obvious to me. He would point out a snapped twig, a dislodged stone, the print of a heel in beck-side mud and grunt. I followed meekly as the tempest roared through the skeletal boughs above, blasted white on the windward side by snow, black and wet on the other. Once or twice, I thought I heard something above that relentless cacophony, a thunderous growl that came up through the soles of my feet as though we were at York races and the horses were charging by us. Then, I thought I'd seen a light behind, in the immense twisted darkness of the forest, a green light that I caught at the very edge of my vision, only briefly, but enough to impart the sensation that it was a flame, a rolling green flame boiling between the dark trunks of winter dead oaks and sycamores. "Pete," I said.
He hushed me. "We're near Pen Howe."
Pen Howe was a tumulus in the heart of the wood, a Bronze Age monument forbidden to us as children because of the singular evil with which it was associated in folklore.
"She reckoned she was being chased," I said. The teeth chattered hard in my skull and the iron of the gun burned through the wet wool of my gloves.
Pete turned to face me. "By who?"
"I told you, she's not right in the head."
"How she's kept going through this snow on bare hooves is a mystery to me,"
he said.
"Drugs can make people perform rare physical feats."
"'course I never had your schooling. Some of us worked farms while others pissed off to University."
"The girl could be dying, Pete."
He sighed so loudly I heard it above the crack of dry branches in the gale. The snow flew almost sideways through the primeval wood., and I squinted into it as though a handful of grit had been thrown into my face. "You stay here," he said. "It's a dead end with the cliff behind the Howe, if she comes back this way, stop here."
"Do you want the gun?"
"No," he said, "I'd be too tempted to use the bugger on you when I got back."
I laughed at his scorn. He stroked his wet beard, pulled the hat lower onto his brown and pushed his way forward through trees that were grey with spattered snow. The air stank as though something was burning but there was another odour beneath it, like that of a badger trapped in a set, savage, rank and dangerous. I supposed something was dead out there among the trees. "You smell that?" Pete shouted back.
"I do."
"Keep your eyes open and have a care not to shoot me coming back." He stepped a few more paces through the drifting snow and called back. "What do they call this girl, by the way?"
"Huldra."
He laughed. "That's not a person's name, mate." Then he stepped below the bank and I lost sight of him.
I crouched beside ivy wrapped oaks and gazed into the gloom. The breaths escaped me in long silver clouds and I watched them dissipate into the wind when I heard the roar above me and felt a gust that knocked me flat into the icy mud and then I saw them.
At first, I thought it was a flock of geese lost in the storm, grey bodies writhing above the trees against the larger black of night. Then I realised no bird moved as these things were, no birds twisted and struggled and twined around each other the way these grey things did. The forms darted as though mercury through cloud and the ghost of the storm, and I heard the sound again, that horn. This time the earth shook beneath its screech and I felt something pop in my ears and, Lord help me, if I didn't scream. Then they had passed, and I had the sensation something of great power and size had passed, as though I was a small dinghy in an ocean bobbing in a battleship's wake. I struggled to my feet, using the gun to push myself up and headed over the bank towards the Howe. A green glow ahead flickered through the trees, shimmering in the ice frozen across puddles on the track where Pete had stumbled.
Twelve Mad Men Page 14